Indie game dev: From Minecraft to Defold

Defold continues our partner wrap-up of NG16:

Here at Defold we love to see what indie game developers create. We asked Lukas Palmer, a developer who writes a dev diary on the Defold forum, about his game Labyrinth and game development in general.

Defold: What game was it that made you realize that you wanted to make your own games?

LP:Minecraft. After being on the fence about game development after my interest was sparked by a few other games, I finally took the plunge and began to learn Java through Minecraft. I made little edits and additions here and there in the Minecraft source and observed the results; From that I pieced together an understanding of Java that has developed into an ability to create my own games over time.

Defold: Can you tell us a little more about the game that you are making now in Defold?

LP: Right now I’m making Labyrinth; it’s a sort of dungeon crawler set in a shifting tunnel system, leading to gameplay that will be challenging on multiple aspects. While you fight to survive against a variety of enemies, you’ll have to navigate a puzzling maze that likes to move itself around every once in a while. Usually right before you figure it out. Aesthetics are done in a low-resolution “retro” style that seems to fit the game well:

Defold: What has been the most useful feature you didn’t know about when you started using Defold? Can you tell us more about how you use it?

LP: Defold’s visual profiler:

As I’ve gotten used to Defold, I’ve stumbled my way into some performance issues a couple times; the visual profiler has given me an accurate image of what’s taking a lot of time under the hood allowing me to look in the right spot for flaws in my code.

Defold: Based on what you know now, having used Defold for a while, what advice would you give to a new Defold user? Are there any simple mistakes that are easy to avoid?

LP: Make sure you have a solid understanding of the object hierarchy in Defold. Message passing, the scene graph, and sockets are a little difficult to get a handle on at first but are quite useful once you get the hang of them.

Defold: Looking at the indie game community, what would you say is the most inspiring thing right now?

LP: VR is pretty interesting; now that powerful GPUs are becoming more available and cheaper, the world of VR game dev is growing quickly and populating with interesting and innovative indie games. I’ve even seen some VR painting software.

Defold: When you choose what platform(s) you want to develop for, what are the most important aspects?

LP: I like the amount of processing power available on desktop platforms: particularly, dedicated GPUs are capable of some amazing things. The processing power of a desktop (or even laptop) graphics card opens up a lot of possibilities for visual effects and creations that have never been present until now. Not really that relevant to my current project, which isn’t that demanding on hardware, but I plan to work on some more graphically intensive things in the future.

Defold: If you would have to choose between developing all your games on pen and paper, or in Microsoft Word with the “Clippy” assistant activated, what would you choose and why?

LP: Well, it sounds like I’m going to have an awful time either way, so I think I’ll go with pen and paper since crumpling up a piece of paper is lot more satisfying than deleting a project.

Do you want to build something too? Download the free 2D game engine Defold right here!